Green Baron

There are more mind boggling design proposals: the runway, 150m wide, could have a flat inner part and an increasing bank angle to the outside so that aircraft can choose their paths on take off and landing depending on conditions and what they want to expose the passengers to. I can well imagine that operating this kind of design needs a precision that to handle should better be left to machines. If it is a joke then a very thoughtful one. And less ridiculous than Musk's idea of "resistance is futile .." :-)

I don't think it would, can't imagine how. Microwave landing system wouldn't work either. They are all designed for a fixed threshold. One would need something much more flexible, that could project the threshold anywhere on the circle and that for multiple approaches on curved courses. Byebye ILS, you served us well ... Also approaches and departures are based on fixed paths (it was 15 years ago, that still so ?), VORs or NDBs show the way. Holding patterns are designed for one way in and one way out. These also had to be rethought. I could imagine some futuristic installations on ground as well as in the aircraft that could calculate the paths for incoming and leaving traffic and transmit it to the pilots via projection or vr. Train the crews for that ... Or (and i already hear you all shouting) kick out the crew and let the computer do it. It's not my idea :-) Edit: the concept paper linked above says that such procedures have to be defined, but by 2050 technology should be able to transmit and present all necessary data to the crew in an appropriate way (p. 19).

Yeah, an airfield. I mean, this is all very interesting, but the modern idea of a huge circular runway tries to address different problems than those of the 30s and 40s. Like traffic volume, separation and spacing, crosswind, noise reduction, space usage in metropolitan areas, handling in terminals and so on. Besides the first hasty reactions and a few nonsense posts on this, i personally don't think it is realizable at all (right now), but mainly because many of the established procedures, standards and the related technology like approach and departure, navigation and landing aids had to be redone. If i take into account how impossible it seems to switch to digital radio in air traffic ...

?? I hope you mean the opposite direction ...

I go and help farting full the shuttle :-)

Beautiful ! Impressive !

@softweir: don't drink and fly. That addresses 3-5 :-) Read the concept paper. Many off the points are discussed. Yes, it is unconventional, but what you describe actually happens every day and the concept is meant to reduce some of that. I don't say it's perfect or better or even realizable right away, it's just if you read it you find out that people have thought of it :-)

The aircrafts surely not :-) It's just a concept and we might never see it but i like the idea.

The runway is inclined to reduce that to 0.2g ... Edit: if you're interested: concept description with discussion of technical and organizational aspects. True, it's unconventional, but not insane or crazy :-)

Sure, it is not new and still in the state of an idea (and maybe will not leave it), but i wouldn't do away with it so rapidly. Aircraft will not need more than a section of the circle. Yeah, they would have to steer a curve during takeoff run and landing. Jeb says: So ? In calm conditions several sections could be used (3 - 4, maybe more) simultaneously. Today aircrafts have to divert if it is too crosswindy (though the limits are high). They don't reduce wake turbulence, that is constructive thing. But wake turbulence spacing can be easier; just give different wt classes a few degrees difference in their approaches. Today careful spacing must be observed which reduces capacity. Also noise is an issue in crowded areas. Since the touchdown point on straight runway is fixed a circular one would allow for more flexibility. Today all the spacing, patterns, approaches and procedures are designed for straight runways. But in principle the technology has not left the 60s (aside from gps). A lot of changes would be necessary and probably a lot of "intelligence" shifted from ground equipment to the aircraft to allow for the required flexibility. So, I could imagine that technology is not the limiting factor for such a change. Air traffic procedures are a worldwide thing ... Be it as it may, i found it a nice idea. I like it when things are being questioned :-)

Airtraffic is very conservative to innovations. I remember the microwave landing system a few decades ago which would have allowed for curved 3d approaches instead of the 2d localizer/glideslope ILSs. It was only installed on one airport due to political reasons (the manufacturers of ILSs sat in one particular country ;-)). Hehe. You'll actually have to touch down at the touch down point, not anywhere on the strip :-) In the presentation it's 3.5km long, 140m wide and slightly inclined towards the center. Shouldn't be too big a thing to scale it to ksp proportions ... Edit: one of the and probably the biggest advantage is that aircraft can always land against the wind. Which will cause youtube to concentrate even more on kitten clips ...

Hi, apparently no april-joke. It works and has advantages. http://www.endlessrunway-project.eu/ Aircraft-tyres manufacturers will rub their hands :-) Whether it'll be realized is another story.

I am not that much into believing.

It's the other way round, nature does not behave like our simplistic models, our simplistic models try to describe processes in nature. Also the fantasies of science fiction authors (Rama comes to my mind when reading about gathering species from planets) are nice for entertainment but not reality. Really, you must understand at least part of the processes in order to judge how much our modeling can describe and where it's limits are. What you put forward here as control theory is originally meant to describe industrial processes that run in very restricted and limited environments, where constraints of processes, materials and so on are known and can be computed (have been before contsruction). Also, i kindly ask to doublecheck the place of mathematics in the tree of natural sciences. You put mathematics at the wrong end for describing natural processes. It is a tool, an abstraction like a language for physics (even philosophy uses it) to model nature, but nature is not mathematics. *sigh* :-)

Hallo Nachbar (hi neighbour) ;-) Specialisation and diversity are an outcome, not direction. Also they are somewhat exclusive. Specialization leads to narrow "nicheing", change the niche and the highly specialized organism dies if it can't adapt fast enough. Sabretooth is an example for a highly specialized way of hunting. It worked as long as prey in form of huge animals was abundant in the cold steppe. Climate change and competition sorted that out. Diversity depends on the number of available niches and "carrying capacity" of the environment. Narrow that and diversity will diminish. We call that extinction (which is part of evolution !) or even mass extinction if the narrowing takes place on a large scale. Or even a global scale like humanity does to the environment right now. No direction or goal is present, it is just the outcome of the mechanisms that drive evolution. dit: this is going OT. I kindly ask to search the forum, specially the fermi-thread, because all that was discussed here before. Also there are good essays about evolution on the internet, from universities or natural history sites/museums. I don't want to type it all over again :-)

Nope. Only the variation part could be interpreted as "statistical", though it obeys chemistry and thus physics. I don't let you out of this one :-) But biological evolution is much more comprehensive than mere variation of a code during replication, it encompasses all the processes that form niches for organisms, like plate tectonics, sedimentation, forming of sinks and wells in the spheres (cryo-, bio-, atmo-, litho-, blabla), water stands on global or local scales, the list is long and worth exploring ;-) Also organisms themselves can form sinks, corals for CO2 for example. A lot of feedback- and control circuits are at work, from wilson cycle over conveyor bands to evaporation of epeiric seas in the large scales to co-evolution between for example animals and plants (horses and grass) or symbiosis' between organisms. It's physics, and very complicated.

@KerikBalm is right, evolution is a natural process that has no direction or goal. You accused him of creationist thoughts but apparently you fell for them yourself ... In contrary to thinking that there is a direction one should apply the mechanisms that we know about in biological evolution. The big picture is quite clear, but (many) details remain to solve, in particular the beginnings. There have been proveedings in the last years, Kerim Balm the RNA before DNA thing which is known as the RNA-world hypothesis, by now the most accepted hypothesis for the beginning. We do not know the exact conditions on earth at that time, shortly after solidification of the crust, chemism of the ocean, atmosphere, crust, etc. because there are no traces left, but have an overall picture. To condense it to the thoughts that many have these days about et-life: it might well be that, given that the elements needed are not really rare, if the conditions are right (temperature, available energy, low radiation, etc. pp.) that the evolutionary process will start quite automatically because it's just chemistry (subdivision of physics ;-)). Which lead relatively fast (a few hundred million years) to microbial life. Maybe that helps you letting go of the idea of a direction, it's just physics :-)

*lol* Nothing. That i am too annoyed by the editor to correct it over and over again. The forum editor has a bug. When i cite something, place the cursor inside the citation, press enter two times to start a comment then the cursor will stay at place while i type and the typing will flow from the cursor to the right. So it is reversed. Superluminal sotosay :-))) The following lines then are correct, only the first shows that behaviour. I have realized that other users encounter this as well ... Edit: see ? first line reversed ...

I understood "build" as make an egg with a hard shell and build a nest for it. That's what happened (a little more than) 300my ago (besides other things :-)). The rest absolutely dacc (French colloquial "agrred"). yrroS but that's nonsense and not even an argument. Evolution has no top or highest achievements, it fills niches. In that "we" are not better than bacteria or a flower. Take off your clothes and go out in a winter night. You're dead (3 times). Take our technology from us and of the 7billion a few will survive (not necessarily those with the biggest brains or those with the best behaviour). We are good at tool making and -use and that allows us to walk on dead bodies since a few thousand years (!), i doubt that this is a top-development and will survive in the long run. Though i don't know the future ... :-)

? ton yhW What is the problem with infinity ? Lorentz is not involved here. It is simply that where the universe closed (time limited), then a full featured black hole with an event horizons could not exist because it requires objects/radiation that meets its Sr to go to infinity in the time frame of the surrounding universe. I try another choice of words: as an objects approaches the Sr its proper time goes through an increasing "amount" of time in the universe. The process is accelerated as the object comes closer to the Sr. From outside it looks like the object is getting ever slower until it stops at the Sr (which cannot be observed as we have stated above). And that stop is the interesting thing because it means that in a very short proper time in the object the time around passes. If you want the time frames mapped: at the Sr passes in an infinite short proper time an infinite long universe time. Or, the object passes the Sr in every timeslice of the universe since the time of the universe is compressed to what we call the event horizon. Or it is not an Sr or event horizon but something similar that behaves like one. I again link to the Brown guy, another text because i doubt i can describe it correctly, but i can imagine that Wikipedia has something similar somewhere ...

But still we are ruled by evolution. Our understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms permits us to use them to artificially select features we see as appropriate. If we could edit the genome and produce species from the drawing board and freeze our own genome so that natural evolution stops for us then we can talk again. I kindly ask to revisit my dispute on this with a co-kerbonaut over in the fermi-thread.

O.o., and i was just starting to like your argumentation ... We don't rule the evolution (yet), we use it's mechanisms to control the environment or breed to our satisfaction and especially to do away with organisms, either actively in killing for profit or fun and passively in destroying formerly occupied niches. But if our brain shrinks again we have to step back into the foodchain. The fact that we are influencing natural selection with medicine (i'd call that artificial selection but am sure a purist will stand up and correct me soon (tm)) and so on could even accelerate the process, who knows. I.am.not.a.creationist. Simple, if we assume that such a thing over 4 billion years only occured once (it was and is an incredibly complex and interdependent system that has evolved on earth !) then we have to assume that we are the only ones. Not for long, species come and go. Probabilities don't help us. No. You need an organism that is able to "mutate", to change the code over generations in order for "mutations" to happen. Evolution is a continuous process. Certain "jumps" may be an artifact of our observation methods and the large timespans. But nobody said: "Here is a lung, get out of the soup and walk on land !" :-) btw.: the link didn't work. If not @work any more, could you try to find that 200+°C organism ? ? eruS Oh, come on ! They are all out there waiting to steal our women ? :-) Man i have too much time today :-)

I keep it funny :-) Being "primitive" can have its advantages. They are very, very fit. Ah, so the amniotic egg was that thing #300millionyearsago. Ok, it works until today. Yeah, that brain thing is actually something tricky to explain evolutionwise, it needs a lot of energy and few really use its potential. Mayhaps it'll be sorted out as overkill in the future ...

No offense, ok ? First, unicellulars changed ocean and atmospheric chemisms. Be humble :-) #300millionyearsago: i'll have to guess ... amniotic egg (reptiles) ? an Ice Age ? A supercontinent ? a huge desert ? an earthwide ocean ? Bikini weather ? Cancel that, uninteresting at that time :-)) #severaltensofmillionyearsago ... the list is long ... give us a hint .. the first letter maybe ?

Oh, ok, what i read did not try to explain what happens "inside". Here you left me :-) I apologize for my un-sciency and philosophically choice of words but, hey, this is a game forum and i am trying to use my own words on a complicated matter ! If we assume that as the spaceship approaches the Schwarzschild radius (Sr) and its time in relation to the universe runs faster and faster (it accelerates through the universe's time or crosses all the timelines of the universe) it is ever more shifted into the future of the universe until when really reaching the Sr is taken into the infinite future of the universe because it takes from the universe's reference frame an infinite time to cross the Sr. Am i still with me ? Now, could that happen in a closed universe ? As black holes exist and they do grow but it takes infinite time seen from the universe to cross the Sr then there has to be an infinite future, no ? Which means that the universe cannot be a closed one that one day collapses again, that wouldn't be infinite and couldn't contain full featured black holes, right ? This point is of course not mine, it's from the literature i found on the subject. But it has that aha ! aspect :-)